Cherreads

Chapter 1 - setting and theme

Beneath three fractured moons drifts the broken carcass of a world, stitched together by wars that never ended and prayers that were never answered. This is Neon Tartarus — a realm forged in the aftershocks of divine death, where the bones of gods are not metaphor but landscape, and their ichor seeps like radiation into soil, sky, and soul.

The air itself is alive here. It hums with static, whispers with forgotten hymns, and carries the stink of ozone, burnt iron, and blood that has never dried. When storms sweep across the horizon, they are not weather but divine memories breaking open, lightning sketching silhouettes of dead titans in the clouds.

The land is carved into wounds — wildlands that bleed crimson sap, canyons that echo with screams from another age, wastelands where machine-gods rust yet still dream. Travelers walk on ground that trembles, for even the soil remembers the wars of gods.

Civilization survives, but it does not thrive. Floating cities cling to the upper skies like barnacles, fortresses squat on mountains of bone and steel, and nomadic clans move through ruins that are older than history itself. Every bastion of safety is ringed by scars, trenches, and wards — for beyond them lies not wilderness but the hunger of the void, forever pressing inward.

At the center of it all are the corpse-gods, their bodies scattered like mountains and their remains plundered for relics. To carve a blade from a god's rib is sacrilege and survival in equal measure. To drink from their ichor is to gamble with corruption, madness, and transcendence. Every city, every faction, every soul here is defined by how they approach this truth: the world itself is a grave, and the grave is still breathing.Above, the fractured moons pull at the tides of reality. One bleeds light, one bleeds shadow, and one bleeds time — and where their influence overlaps, dungeons open like wounds in the world. These megadungeons are not simply places but living labyrinths, shaped by memory, hunger, and paradox. They whisper promises, demand sacrifices, and lure mortals into their hollowed guts.

The war never ended. The Ascendant Astral Armada patrols the skies, its fleets half-cathedral, half-starship, fueled by fragments of celestial engines stolen from god-corpses. Their enemies are not merely armies but concepts — entropy, madness, forgotten divinities that still stir.

Neon Tartarus is a realm where faith is a weapon, where every prayer might ignite or corrupt, where to survive is to play servant and thief to a broken cosmos. It is a place where every ruin is alive, every shadow might be the afterimage of a god, and every dream carries the taste of eternity.

Here, the apocalypse has already happened. The world did not end — it simply kept rotting, flowering, and fighting beneath alien stars. The world is a wound that never closed. Three fractured moons drag their broken faces across a sky where the sun flickers like a dying torch. Beneath them sprawls Neon Tartarus, a realm built atop the corpses of gods — their bones are mountains, their veins are rivers of ichor, and their dreams seep into the soil like a fever that will never break.

Time itself is unstable here. Centuries collapse into hours, and some places echo with voices from futures that have not yet happened. The land remembers too much, and it punishes those who dare to forget.

Civilizations rise from the wreckage, but they are not kingdoms in the old sense. They are strongholds, floating cities, war-cults, and scavenger tribes — fragile sparks against the eternal night. The most powerful among them, the Ascendant Astral Armada, patrolsthe heavens with star-forged vessels, desperate to keep apocalyptic horrors from spilling across the realm. Yet even they cannot dam the flood forever.

The ground itself betrays its inhabitants. Forests bleed when cut. Deserts whisper secrets in languages no living tongue should know. Oceans glow with the phosphorescence of drowned gods, their tides pulled not by gravity, but by the restless hunger of the void.

And always, there are the Ruins. Megadungeons, spires, and craters — remnants of wars waged between gods, demons, and beings that never fit any name. Some are machines the size of nations; others are labyrinths carved into the flesh of reality. To enter them is to gamble with sanity, yet adventurers, zealots, and fools keep crawling back, clutching shards of power, their eyes too bright, their voices trembling with truths they were not meant to know.

Life in Neon Tartarus is not survival. It is defiance. To walk upon this land is to stand on the edge of unmaking, knowing that every breath is stolen from the jaws of something vast and patient. And yet, the people endure. They worship shattered idols, they forge weapons from divine scrap, they sing songs to keep the darkness at bay.

The realm is not dead — it is dreaming. And dreams, when they wake, become hungers.

The world is broken in ways that cannot be mended. The sky is a graveyard of light: three moons, each splintered and bleeding dust, drag their fragments across the firmament like chained corpses. Their scars shimmer with unnatural colors — green fire, violet mist, scarlet flame — so that even night burns. The sun itself is wounded, flickering in and out of existence, as though it, too,

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